San Francisco-based application performance company, Riverbed, announced today that it's acquiring Aternity, a company that helps enterprises improve the user experience of their network applications. Riverbed declined to provide the financial details of the transaction.

The acquisition of the privately held company is meant to expand Riverbed’s SteelCentral performance monitoring system. SteelCentral provides Riverbed customers and partners with visibility into the network, the application layer, and the end user experience. With the purchase of Aternity, Riverbed’s end user experience will be enhanced and provide more insight than before, says Nik Koutsoukos, VP of product marketing at Riverbed.

“We already can measure end user experience by looking and decoding network traffic and monitoring the web browser. But Aternity is an end-user monitoring solution that collects data directly from the end-user’s device — including user behavior, location, and app performance — and centralizes that data into a single console to show what the end user is experiencing,” Koutsoukos says.

Aternity’s technology helps enterprises monitor the user experience for any application running on any device. Basically, it turns the device into a self-monitoring platform that is user experience aware, Riverbed says. Aternity currently monitors more than 1.7 million mobile, virtual, and desktop workforce devices. Riverbed will now be able to extend its SteelCentral monitoring system across these devices.

“You need to have a full understanding of what the end-user’s activity is which is what Aternity does,” Koutsoukos says.

This acquisition follows Riverbed’s acquisition of software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) provider, Ocedo in January, which helped it get SteelCentral to market faster with application-defined SD-WAN.